


From the Summit to the Flat

by Papapaldi



Series: Series 12 [5]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Big angst, Gen, I write the sort of conversations 13 would never have, Post-Episode: s12e08 The Haunting of Villa Diodati, a little bit gay, incoherent mess, spooky time lord stuff, the Doctor actually shares stuff, watch this be completely non canon by next week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-20
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:35:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22811074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Papapaldi/pseuds/Papapaldi
Summary: The TARDIS translates the scribblings of a 17th century poet into the temporal coordinates of a terrible war. There's time to think, to agonise, and to talk. The Doctor begins a precarious descent from the stratosphere, to the summit, to the flat.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan & Graham O'Brien & Ryan Sinclair, Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan
Series: Series 12 [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1647982
Comments: 31
Kudos: 105





	1. Bringer of Darkness

**Author's Note:**

> An entirely incoherent love letter to the fam. Incorporating bits of Lord "Danger" Byron's poem 'Darkness'  
> Each of the fam gets a chapter and a heartfelt conversation, just in case – ya know – one of them... doesn't make it (sobs)

A Duty of Care (from Hell Bent) because I feel like it fits:

_ The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars _

_ Did wander darkling in the eternal space, _

_ Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth _

_ Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air.  _

Sheffield, 2018

She’d hoped there would be stars, and now she is among them. The hope is pressed deep, like an old ache, a footprint in the sand; washing, washing. One more lifetime. One last chance. 

Water like the night air, whipping past, the moisture in it coating her face in steely, bitter cold. She falls, new; somewhere between death and birth as cells rage with golden fire. Old, tattered clothes billow in dark, ragged strips; lank hair, wind-whipped and turning – or blooming – silver to pale gold. Her eyes are wide and tearful in the cold – fearful as she falls, arms reaching, fingers curling through the dark trying to grip, to grasp up at the diminishing flourish of fire in the sky that is her home; exploding, expelling. She gasps; first breaths from new lungs – smaller, shallower, hearts thrumming beneath new ribs, pumping new blood. 

And the darkness follows. It streaks behind her like a shadow sewn at her extremities (small and smooth and milky in the night). It’s cast; a pall of black brewing like a storm, oncoming, always coming. Falling. She can’t help the smile that spreads her lips; white teeth (new teeth) bright and glinting, sharkish, manic. Fizzling with energy. She’s a coil wound tight, spiralled metal strands teeming with potential. Terror and adrenaline mingles with the fire in her gut – it keeps her fast, and fighting, and living. She feels the cradle of the Earth beneath her, and readies herself for the blow that she knows will fail to tear her apart, because she’s not done yet. Still cooking. Unborn. She’s crashing – a star, shooting down across the night – and the magnetic field of the planet (the turn of the Earth, the twisting of time) envelopes her in a familiar embrace. Home. 

And the darkness follows – a premonition, a promise – and she is its bringer. 

**…**

Lake Geneva, 1816

The three of them stand before her; raised, staring determinedly down despite the fear glossing their expressions, and their eyes, searching her. Searching, she thinks, for a trace of old joy and simplicity, or a lick of anger sputtering away like a flame about to catch. She doesn’t want to take them with her, because she could never forgive herself if anything happened to any of them. The worst part is that, despite its enormity, the pain would be bearable. She’s done a great many unforgivable things, and she’s endured all the same. She always does.

A new face means a new chance. The other part of her – the renewed part that never learns, and forgets past pain in the lines of their smiles, the eddies of their eyes – wants desperately for them to stay. She can’t be alone now; the thin, whistling chill of the stratosphere burns, burrows deep into her bones. Alone. She needs them beside her, because they’ve always been the best of her – and where she’s going, she can’t afford to leave the best of her behind. If she were to scrape away all the parts of herself she’s learnt to pretend are there for the sake of her friends, nothing would remain but a hollow, bitter anger. A darkness. She needs them, to keep her light.

When she asks them to leave, she knows what their answer will be. She can hear it in the timbre of their thoughts, the conviction; utterly bent and utterly pure. They won’t leave her – and it’s stupid, and loyal, and so, _ so _ human. In guilt, she smiles. 

The coordinates will take awhile to translate into something her ship can use – primitive cyber tech coordinates scribbled out by a 19th century poet just aren’t compatible with the majesty of her time ship. Just her luck. More time to plan, and more time to stew, idle, reflecting, picking apart every aspect of her psyche. Tearing at an impossible choice. She tells them to get some rest, and wonders if they’ll be able to sleep after everything they’ve seen tonight. They go their separate ways, and their thoughts diminish in their waning proximity; spooled tight with nerves and anticipation. Guilt of their own, and fear too; of where they’re going, and of her. It hurts, because she staunched the flow of her anger for so long, and stemmed their fear with the same bluntish force, but everything ends. She just hopes this isn’t it. 

Jack would understand, she thinks, if they ever meet again. He knows her, knows she doesn’t sacrifice the people she loves, not for anything. 

His warning echoes, relayed by her friends;  _ beware the lone cyberman.  _ She can do wary – she’s wary nearly all the time – it’s one of her talents. She’s been told to beware of a great many things in a great many lifetimes; bad wolves and four knocks, silences and astronauts, questions and unutterable answers, hybrids and birds. Being wary is all well and good, but in the end, the warnings and prophecies always catch up, no matter how fast she runs. 

_ Don’t give it what it wants, at all costs _ ; but some costs are too high, even for the universe. It’s always her, making the impossible choice, weighing lives as lord of time. The last; no one else. No one to stop her. In the cellar of the villa, dust settling upon her shoulders like the weight of so many lives (judged in a moment, swept off and discarded), she cast herself back. So many variations of the same moment; the Daleks or the Earth (twice), saving the world but losing her, the last of the star whales or the cruel strains of humanity – days on which nobody human has a stake in her judgement, because she’s alone at the summit, and the cries of the rest of them fall away to whispers far below. Tiny; not giants at all. Choosing who lives and who dies, a monster – and whether it’s right or it’s wrong is just  _ tough.  _ She’s good at standing, and falling, and choosing where to do it. Like two wires, touching or held apart, smother in the cradle or rage across the stars, because who is she to make that choice? Who is she, but the only one who can? Like a button in a barn, richly red and un-pushed, or a volcano erupting at her command because she  _ always makes it happen _ . 

But she stands, as ever, by a contradictory promise: never be cowardly – unless it suits. Unless it threatens everything she’s built over the course of so many centuries of interfering non-interference. Shaping history from the shadows, whether she means to or not. Stopping alien invasions – for the loss of life they’d bring, of course, but also for the great steaming hole an event like that would pick through her perfectly curated 21st century paradise. Too soon for alien tech, too soon for the world to know about the scope of life in the teeming universe, because she’s guiding this world along the straight and narrow; experiencing, forgetting, and never learning. Learning means changing, and she doesn’t like change. That’s the worst part; she enjoys their ignorance, their wonder, their familiarity. Let time change and it would branch around her, a stream diverted by a rock, flowing round, meeting on the straight. In flux, while she’s always fixed. Sentinel on the summit; alone. Left to choose. If a choice threatens all that, the careful merticulaton of all her lives spent on this willfully,  _ blissfully _ ignorant home away from home, then the choice is simple. Coward, any day. 

_ Armies will rise, and billions will die _ ; but when have billions ever mattered to her? In amongst all those billions; past, present, and future, there are people like them. People she might lose now either way – people she’s been losing for a long, slow time. Losing them to disquiet, mistrust, fear in the face of lies.

This version of her, this new chance, it isn’t like the rest. She’s lost too much to love openly, and so she does it in a guarded way; at arms length, indulging them, laying out ground rules, expecting the good sort of questions, but not the sort that question  _ her.  _ Not the sort that make her feel like a monster, because after all this time how can she  _ still  _ not be sure, when for the sake of the human race, she has to be. She has to be right, because she’s the mediator, between this planet and the cosmos, between those in need and those who wish to do harm. An idea, not a person. Something for them to strive towards, not a being with fears and doubts and a past. People get emotional, people make mistakes – but ideas do nothing of the sort. Every impossible choice must be iron-clad in its judgement; whether that means walking away or interfering. Whether that means killing, through action or inaction, all she has to be is sure. Right. All she has to do is win. 

She was supposed to be the guardian, she’s sure of it – the power felt at home inside her. Whoever sent the Cyberion back through time entrusted it to her, thinking she’d hide it within herself, or on the TARDIS. Time Lord technology is no match for a cyber-fleet and their rudimentary time travel tech – the tide of war would have turned, finally, in humanity’s favour. Hope and emotion, their greatest strengths, a final, unlikely victory – it’s exactly the sort of story she likes, exactly the sort that should have tempted that great, benign, benevolent being she was trying so hard to become. But sometimes, she doesn’t do what’s right, doesn’t even do what’s kind. Instead, she condemned them, every one of that future race – unless she can stop it. Unless she can chase her mistakes in a spiralling circle down into the dark, interfering, rearranging, bending time and minds and their laws so that she’ll never have to lose again. 

But she’s met with an uncomfortable truth;  _ sometimes, even I can’t win.  _ Sometimes, no matter the hope; the heat of the fire and the vibrancy of the flames, darkness consumes, darkness sustains. Darkness abides, in the face of everything. And maybe that’s what’s waiting for them at that war zone at the end of the world, and maybe that’s what’s waiting for her, when she inevitably loses her new best friends. Just the dark. Even now, in the blackness of her mind, white chalk letters are scratched stark across the surface;  _ how are you going to win?  _ Sharp, like a spur in her side. 

She stands at the console, one hand pushed against the uneven crystal ridged pillar. The crystal and the glittering lights; all show, no substance – just there for the look, the magic of it. Just there to glow bright and put a smile on the faces of those fortunate, or perhaps unfortunate, enough to catch her eye, and earn a trip in the box. Like her; all show, no substance. Dig down to the root of her and all you’d find is cold, cold like the clinical white and sparse gilded metal of a type 40 tardis, no golden glow. Like her ship, she redecorates – and she never really likes it, except when it’s her present. Hindsight and foresight glare at her from each direction, and always in hate. 

She feeds the sheet of 19th century scribblings into the TARDIS machinery, letting it scan over the artistic flourish lent through ink to a language entirely void of anything of the sort. Cyber language, cyber numbers. They’re going to take a while to iron out into something she can use. The cyberion had rooted itself within her nerves, her synapses, long enough to blare through that overwhelming arc of the future. Destruction, and the AI’s plans to continue along its path; upgrade, improve, rein, against all odds. Hooking herself up to the telepathic circuits would be a long shot, and a risky one at that – cyber tech is clever, it leaves a mark on all it touches, and it’s very good at hijacking machinery. So, it’s all she can do to stand there, listening to the sound of the machine ticking over, working that mind of hers over this once possible, now achingly probable future they’re heading towards, while her pilot agonises over a choice she can’t change.

“Did I do the right thing?” The Doctor murmurs, staring so intently at the blinking lights before her that her eyes glaze and spot with mottled red.

The ship hums a comforting response, or maybe it’s a warning. Now, more than ever, she wishes they could talk. Instead, she buries her mind in the recesses of the mechanism; numbers reeling off, temporal coordinates calculating, sifting through possibilities. She loses herself in the majesty of the technology, an expansive cathedral, beyond even her comprehension. It will just have to be enough. 

She digs her heels deeper into the soles of her boots, her fingers lacing themselves white-knuckled and red-tipped against the metal rim of the console. Her pale coat hangs about her like a shroud; trailing, trembling over the tension in her shoulders pushed back, sharp. Tight. The lights fade to a haze of blue, the central console flickering a weakened gold, humming to her a feeble song in consolation, as it calculates the exact position of the war she ensured would begin. 


	2. A Duty of Care

A Duty of Care (from Hell Bent) because I feel like it fits:

_And men were gather'd round their blazing homes_

_To look once more into each other's face;_

_Happy were those who dwelt within the eye_

_Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:_

_A fearful hope was all the world contain'd._

Sheffield, 2018

The night was not going at all the way he’d pictured it. It was supposed to be easy: watch the sun set on the hill above Sheffield (and maybe bond with Ryan, he’s been meaning to work on that for ages, but the boy’s hopelessly stubborn), get the train home with Grace, get off the train (after zero complications nor alien encounters), and then settle down with a hot cuppa and a magazine, the calming background buzz of the telly blaring in the sitting room sending him to sleep in his favourite armchair. Sometimes things don’t turn out how they’re supposed to, but that’s never going to stop him from complaining about it. 

He has quite a lot to complain about, he thinks. In just the last few hours he’s witnessed a great many things; a blue mass of electric cables writhing and snapping about on his evening transport, and a woman in what was clearly the tattered remains of a suit meant for a much taller man crashing through the roof of a train (despite there being no trees or building overhead from which to fall) and announcing herself as an alien. The same supposed alien woman kipping out on his sofa and (according to Grace and Ryan) spewing out glowing gold particulates all over their front room. An alien bomb inside him ready to melt his DNA, a warehouse with a mutilated corpse, an alien space pod, and a rooftop encounter with a blue, teeth-faced man. Ridiculous, all of it. He’s half expecting to wake up in his armchair with the telly still blaring along and his tea beside him, grown cold. 

Presently he stands, left in a huff, the cold slowly working its way into his joints, and a blinking light on his collar bone making his stomach twist with nausea. Ahead of him, they’re all running at the aliens – actually running after aliens instead of away from them, where, in his humble opinion, they should most definitely be headed. He isn’t about to be left behind, though, so he musters his courage, along with a healthy dose of wary exasperation, and follows them into the night. 

…

The Time Vortex, ∞

He knows they won’t back down. He knows it with such certainty that he doesn’t bother trying to dissuade them. Two promises tear at him; one to himself, to keep the kids safe, and one to the Doctor, to stay by her side. They’re family, they belong together – have done ever since the Doctor crashed through the roof of that train and changed their lives forever. It’s not fair to ask Ryan and Yaz to go home when Graham knows he never would. Here he is, along with them, running at the aliens. Streaking, with tilted chin and determined gaze, right into danger’s open arms, watching their faces across the flames. He isn’t scared – the feeling doesn’t agree with him, not anymore – but he’s scared for them. He can deal with the aliens – a sentiment he had never expected to reach, especially in his old age – but it’s not the aliens that worry him, it’s losing them, his family. Everytime a new threat emerges worry laces itself leaden through his gut, the anxious ache twisting him up in so many knots that it’s all he can do to stand upright. He can’t let anything happen to them, because he has a duty of care. 

He thinks maybe she has one too, the Doctor. However strange it feels to him, she is the oldest. Maybe he’s always known that, deep down, because no one that young should have eyes that old. 

He finds her alone, coat shed and cast to the floor in a pale twist of fabric. She’s hunched, the sleeves of her white shirt rolled up above the elbows, back curled into an arch beneath her dark waistcoat. Under the muted blue of the console, her hair is silver. 

“Hey Doc,” he announces, because he doesn’t fancy his chances if he sneaks up. He can see the lines of her muscles pulled taut in her arms, her fingers sharp where they clasp the ridge of the console rim. 

Her fingers snap up from where they rest at the sound of his voice, clasping together in a mad, skittish dance in front of her as she turns to face him. “Hiya Graham,” she grins, worn and weary. “Feelin’ ok? Need anythin’?” 

“Ah, no. No, I’m alright,” he assures her, padding down the stairs and towards the console. The ship is silent – none of the usual hums and chirps and whirrs like so many mechanical woodland birds. “How about you?”

“Oh yeah, fine,” she mutters, turning back around, “fine. Got some stuff to be getting on with.” 

“Right, ‘course,” he says, lips pressed into a patient smile. She doesn’t see it, she’s too busy looking down at her hands, decidedly not getting on with anything at all. It’s disconcerting – he almost wants to say eerie, but that might be the recent possible ghost encounter talking – that she isn’t moving at all. The Doctor is never still, and even when she’s avoiding conversation it’s always under the pretence of maintenance, taking something apart just to put it back together, fingers streaked in grease and grit, the comforting clangs of spanners and wrenches and nuts of bolts and the ship, around them, humming along. There’s none of that now. Just silence, and stillness; ship and pilot alike. “Still processin’ those coordinates then?” 

“Yeah.”

“You did say it was gonna take all night,” he reminds her, patient but deliberate. 

“Yeah.” 

“D’you have to watch the console all that time, then?” 

She sighs, “I’m just– ” and slinks back from the console, shrugging her shoulders in a long, drawn movement. “– impatient, I suppose.”

“Yeah, don’t worry, we’ve noticed,” he chuckles. Can’t sit still, can’t wait idle, can’t do undercover. Doesn’t like to be alone, until she does, all the time. Doesn’t like silence, until all she can do is perpetuate it. He thought he had her pinned from the start, with her smiles and her bubbling words; her loneliness – only now he’s coming to realise he didn’t so much have her pinned as she had pinned herself, stuck through with needles and strung up in a pose, fixed – until the pins came loose, one by one, and her stature fell back to its usual slump. The anger and solemnity they’ve seen in her of late, it’s not some turn of her character, rather a return to an old temperament, buried deep under. He ventures, imploringness hidden behind a casual suggestion; “why don’t you take a break?”

She smiles, wistful and quiet. “Breaks – not really one of my strengths.” Facing him again, she pulls her fingers together into knots, writing and pale. Opening her mouth to speak, putting in the conscious effort of addressing him, it’s as if it kicks the rest of her into gear as well; the need to fidget and distract instead of losing herself in that stony solemnity. Her mouth twists, eyes darting away; “I’m nervous,” It slips, like a secret. “Really nervous, actually,” her eyes turn up to meet up to meet his, dark and gleaming. A moment, and they flit away. 

“Worried about what you’ll find?” 

“Worried about how far it’s spread,” she sighs, running those trembling fingers through silver-spun hair. Her navy scarf is wrapped around the back of her neck and trails down in front of either shoulder. They way they hang, broad and symmetrical, is almost regal. Flat team structure; he never really believed it, because the truth was always obvious. She’s always been at the summit, whether she showed it or not. “When the Cyberion was inside my head, I saw the path that the war raged across this planet – this galaxy. All that pain… I could’ve stopped it all from happening.” 

“Do you regret it?” he asks, making up for the absence of her stare with the intensity of his own. He wishes she would meet his eyes. “I mean, you saw all that – all those people dead – and you still chose to save our world?” The younger two, he knew, had been left to wonder lately why the Doctor kept them around, especially after she had let slip her true, unfathomable age. Graham knew better; she cared about them, and tonight had proved that. Tonight had proved that what she felt ran deeper than loneliness. It was older and stranger and far more poignant than anything so simple as a want for companionship. 

“I did, but no, I don’t regret it. I’d do it again – no question,” she shrugs, letting her poise fall. The length of her scarf slips slightly from one of her downturned shoulders, baring her heart, and herself. Climbing down from the summit. “Whoever sent the Cyberion back through time doesn’t know me very well. They thought I’d play host to the AI, protect it, for the sake of humanity’s future. My... err,” she turns her gaze down, and the scarf falls from the slope of her shoulder entirely, swinging to trail down her back, “fascination with your species – it’s sort of well documented. I’ve made a lot of dramatic speeches in my time, nearly every malicious species in the sky knows that this planet is protected. They know the Earth is off-limits.” Graham doesn’t speak, because he feels like it might shatter the illusion, snap the reverie – he wants her to keep going, for the sake of his own bent curiosity and for her sake, too. “But it’s not humanity as a whole I’m protecting, not all the time. It’s people like you, my mates,” and she smiles at him then, “family. I can’t lose you.”

“Doc, that don’t sound much like selfishness to me,” he smiles, warm and patient. Grandfathering – which is a little ridiculous, he thinks, considering her age. It won’t stop him, because he still sees her the way he did when they first met; a wacky thirty-something with a big heart and a deep, aching loneliness. 

“Ah, but it is. It really is.” The scarf seems to be frustrating her now; she wrenches it from her other shoulder and casts it to the floor atop her coat. She expels a shuddering breath, the kind that buries threatening tears – breathing catching in harsh waves over that lump in her throat, smoothing it down. A stone in a river. She leans, the small of her back pressed against the edge of the console and her head tilted back, eyes lost in the reflections of faded gold above, blue simmering beneath. Tears, caught in the throat. “I never really explained, did I, what happened to me the night we all met – the reason I fell, and what happened after, not really.” 

She’d told them a bit – something incoherent about changing, being born, though he hadn’t quite understood or believed her. After that – after Grace – she’d been subdued, and he’d been drowning. No time for questions then, not from him. He knows she was thrown from her ship and fell – from the stratosphere to the flat, in more ways than one, as he’s coming to realise. “Well, you’d regenerated, right? Changed your body,” he prompts. 

“Yeah,” she murmurs, “I fell from the sky, new, alone, terrified. Everything was sharp and present, painful,” she smiles, “confusing. I mean, I was only a couple minutes old, technically, when I crashed through that roof.” She shakes her head, chuckles at his bemused expression. He raises his eyebrows, urging her on. For once, she takes the hint. “And the first thing I saw with those new eyes was her – Grace – then you, behind her. It always grounds me, humanity, when I’m in the midst of all that turmoil. Your faces, your thoughts – they’re like an anchor to my past, and my purpose. My identity, I suppose. It was Yaz and Ryan after that, and we were all swept up in a familiar sort of story. I fell into my old role – one I couldn’t quite remember, but one that felt right. Defending the Earth, helpin’ where help’s needed. I couldn’t remember my own title,” she pauses, hands brought up into familiar, flailing gestures. Enjoying the act of explanation. “I couldn’t remember precisely what I had lost, only that it ached, and that it was my fault. Time came back in pieces, all throughout the night, scraps of memory here and there. I remembered dying,” the final word catches on that lump in her throat, and in response, the lights above pulse a deeper blue. A minute change, but Graham notices. “– and I remembered the promises I made to myself when I did.”

“What sort of promise?” he asks. 

“Not to forget who I am – or who I try to be, at least. Plain and simple; saving people. To be kind, to love, to hope. All the usual stuff.” She falters for a moment, head tilting back down to stare out across the way, eyes reaching backwards. “But there was more to it – I wanted to leave the past behind. Past loss, past failures. Old habits. I couldn’t resist it though – ever since the night we all met, the night I began, the four of you were forever seared onto my hearts,” at which she touches her chest, tracing an idle pattern on the fabric of her waistcoat. “ And when I saw Grace lying there I just,” a gasp, a flutter in her chest. She pushes it down. “I’ve lost a lot of people – one especially, only hours before I met you. Facing off against Tim Shaw reminded me of my purpose, but watching Grace die reminded me of the consequences of enacting it.” 

She’s quiet for a moment. Maybe this is the part where Graham should reassure her – say she’s wrong, but he thinks it would be a lie. Danger follows her like a curse, or perhaps more of a companion. He’s noticed the way they’ve all transformed in her company – for the better, mostly, but there’s a fine line between courage and foolishness. She takes that part of you that’s desperate to prove yourself worthy of living, to save people, to make a mark, and she turns it outwards – weaponises it, almost. He remembers the wild smile across his wife’s face as she ran to her death, enjoying every moment of the chase. He’s seen the same look in Yaz and Ryan, even in himself. Yaz is the one he worries about most of all, because she’s driven by more than a strong sense of moral justice and a need to please – she’s driven by love, or that youthful sort of school-girl crush, the sort that wants to impress and emulate, that watches with calculating awe. “We’re not going to leave you, Doc,” he begins, breaking the broadening silence between them, crossing it. “– and maybe that’s what’s botherin’ you, but it won’t change a thing. We’re coming with you.” 

“I know,” she whispers. It’s exactly the problem. 

“But I do worry about them – Ryan and Yaz. I’d ask them to go back home, but I know they never would.”

“Yeah.” 

“But this is our choice, yeah? It ain’t your fault,” he assures her, “whatever happens.” 

Suddenly, her lip begins to tremble, and her eyes go cold. She brings up a hand to cover her mouth. “I can’t promise you’ll be safe,” she says, words pressed through parted fingers, “I can never keep you safe.”

“It’s okay, though, we know you can’t. You said it yourself, didn’t you, when we stepped into this box. You said you couldn’t promise we’d be safe, but we’re still sure. We’re still with you.” 

The hand across her mouth reaches up to cover her face. Her fingers are shaking. “I can’t lose you, I can’t.” He wants to tell her she won’t, but he doesn’t want to break any promises either. Both of them bound, by a duty of care. A promise made on the cusp of life, and his, upon Grace’s grave. The Doctor sighs, blinking back tears. “That’s something you need to understand about regeneration, Graham, each new life wears me out as I watch people die, and finally I let go, finally I change, and the cycle starts again. Each time I die I find something new, some new hope, some new set of faces to root myself in. Something to live for. That’s what you are to me, this go around. You’ve been here since the beginning of me. I can’t lose you because I don’t know who I am without you.”

There’s not much he feels he can say to that – just stare, eyebrows up and mouth open in a precursor to words, softly lost, softly hoping she’ll say something to fill the silence. He’s usually good at coming up with the right thing to say, the reassuring thing. He’s found in her a problem so removed from his own reality he can barely understand it – just as she was left gaping and awkward at the prospect of his mortality. He can’t remember his beginning, wasn’t shoved out into the world fully formed, a past life clamouring to catch up. He doesn’t have any old promises to keep, only the present. “You say die – is that what it’s like?” He twists his lips into a grim smile; apologetic, wry. He doesn’t look at her. “When you change, is it like dying?”

“Hard to know,” she shrugs, “seein’ as I’ve never done it properly. I think it is though; body, personality – even memories, for a while, as they catch up – they’re all gone. It feels like seperate people inhabiting the same space, the same stream of consciousness. Sometimes I feel like they’re watching me, judging me, maybe.”

“That’s normal though, innit?” Graham ventures, “not recognising the people you used to be, feeling like they’re separate from you. I mean, the man I was four years ago definitely wouldn’t recognise himself in me now, what with all the running after aliens and bein’ a proper space hero,” he chuckles. 

“Different people,” she nods, solemn, “throughout our lives. It’s funny, the lessons you forget.” 

“Hmm,” he affirms. For a moment, there’s silence. In a strange turn, he’s the one filling it with needless movement, tapping his heel against the floor, pushing his hand into the pockets of his jacket. The sound of small movements are deafening, especially when the Doctor, for once, is still. 

“There’s something else I haven’t told you,” she murmurs, still gazing off, away from him. He stands by her side and watches her, precarious and slight; tilted, wilting. He’s ready to catch her if she falls. “The last time I was dying, I wanted it to be the last. I was ready to go. No more new faces, I was done. This isn’t even my last chance, I’ve already spent that, this is just the bonus. This is the final go around to see if maybe I can finally get it right. If I lose you, then that’s it. You’re my final hope, my final life.” 

Her weariness is a palpable as it is jarring. She’s a being of motion; strung through with unending, pinwheeling erraticism – it’s dizzying, usually, only now her stillness is absolute. She seems as if she might melt into the melancholic glow of the ship and its deep, groaning engines, its ancient tangled mechanisms. More of a machine, or a creature. More of an idea than a person. “No pressure then,” he mumbles, nearly a chuckle, but he can’t muster the muscles in his throat to push out such a sound. They die, go lank, in the presence of her. 

“Nah,” she croaks, “no pressure. Don’t worry, I should’ve died a long time ago. I don’t even know how many lives I’ve got left – there’s supposed to be a limit, but they decided thirteen lives wasn’t enough for me.”

He never mustered the courage to ask how many. Thirteen – no, more than that, she said. It’s no wonder she never told them. In all that time, to all those questions, pushing away, swatting them back. All that history to unwind, to explain. Worried they wouldn’t look at her the same way if they knew, and maybe she was right about that. Maybe they can’t. “Please, Doc, no matter what happens,” he says, “promise me you’ll go on. One more promise, just one.” She turns to him, eyes up, infinitely sad and infinitely deep. “You’re brilliant, and kind, and I think the universe needs you.” A thin smile curls her lip. “Even if we go – when we go,” he corrects, because she’ll outlive them all, “you’ll find someone else. Maybe I don’t know as well as you do, being, what, thousands of years old and all that – but I used to be alone in the world. No family; lost, afraid. But I found people – people like Grace, and Ryan. He might not always have been my grandson, but he is now, same as Yaz is like a grandkid to me, too.”

“I’m just…” she closes her eyes, holds them together for a moment, face strained and screwed. “I’m just tired. I’m sick of it. It’s funny,” she begins, brighter, eyes open and hands twisted together in familiar, darting motion, “I really used to hate humans.”

“Well, s’only fair, I hate humans sometimes too,” he chuckles. 

She grins, and springs into anecdote. Familiar territory. “Got two of them aboard my ship – total accident – I wanted to throw them out into the recesses of the time vortex,” she smiles, shaking her head. 

“You what? Really?”

“Yeah,” her smile splits to a grin, sheepish. Embarrassed, he thinks. “Only, I let them stick around, mostly because my, err,” she trails off, fingers twisted worse than ever. Deciding, he realises, how much she should tell. To his delight, she continues; “my granddaughter, actually. Don’t know if I ever mentioned her.” She definitely hasn’t. Graham feels his jaw go slack, his mouth go dry, but doesn’t interrupt. “She’s the one who insisted I tolerate you lot, and I’m glad I did. I’ve never been able to leave humanity alone since then – always finding new people to tag along, new families. Temporary,” she sniffs, “but always magnificent.” 

She hangs her head, and Graham can’t help but ask the question weighing heavy on his heart. “Did you lose her, your granddaughter?” he remembers that sad, bright smile she’d worn after the funeral when she’d said she’d lost all that long ago. That she was alone. 

“Yeah. Yeah I did.” She doesn’t elaborate, and he can’t blame her. That worry that sits heavy in his gut whenever they send Ryan off on his own, whenever there’s real danger afoot, he imagines it plunging down like a leaden weight and dragging him with it, deep into himself. That’s how it might feel, he thinks, to lose him, and he doesn’t know if he’d ever be able to claw his way back up. 

“Did I do the right thing, Graham?” she asks. He’s not sure what she means; giving the cyberman what it wanted, letting billions die in the future to save the world she knows, and the people she loves, or bringing them aboard in the first place, allowing them to worm their way into her hearts, to knit themselves together into a family. Or, perhaps, deciding to live this new life in the first place, promising to hide and to help, and to love. One last time. Either way, he isn’t sure, but he thinks that, in her place, he’d have done the same. Her voice is quiet, almost like an echo; “am I a good man?”

He doesn’t have the heart to correct her, besides, it doesn’t seem important. The sentiment is the same either way. “I think,” he begins, cautious, unsure. It would be a lie to answer a straight ‘yes’ because how can he presume to know such things. She’s right, they don’t know her – not her past, at least. Sometimes he wonders if they even know her present. She’s never quite been clear cut, with all her rules. He’s watched her save lives, and take them. Walk away sometimes, and interfere at others, like she’s guided by some invisible, fickle hand. He’s watched her balk at weapons like an old, disenchanted soldier, yet leave creatures to starve, and people to die. He’s watched her lie, and snap, and gloat monsters with a smile – but he’s also seen the depths to which she loves, and the compassion she extends even to the undeserving. He’s seen how heavy all of this sits within her, and that she struggles to keep it locked away, and tries, always, to keep her promises. “I think you try to be, Doc, and I think,” he smiles, and puts a tentative hand on her shoulder in support. There’s a moment where her muscles flinch, hunched and sharp, but then she relaxes her muscles into his palm, and turns to him with a haunting smile that doesn’t sit quite right on the features of her face, as if, perhaps, the look belongs on another face entirely. “– well, I think that’s probably the point.” 

…

Graham doesn’t stay for long after that, because the Doctor goes quiet, retreating into herself. After a while, his hand falls from her back, and the ship continues to pulse blue under its golden facade. He excuses himself with a murmur, to which she nods, and busies herself in stillness at the console – that eerie stillness, pins fallen from her pose and scattered to the ground. Truthfully, he can’t stand the sight of it. Too opposed to what he once believed was true – besides, he’s getting ready for a retreat of his own, right into his nice comfortable bed. Despite all the talk of ghosts (who may or may not be real, because his life really needed more long-held impossible things to become true) he won’t say no to a good kip before they arrive at the end of the world. He thinks he’s going to need the rest. 

Despite the fact that he’s willingly entering a post-earth war zone, finally, maybe fatally, running after aliens into the dark, he can’t help but feel excited. _Is it wrong_ _that I’m enjoying this?_ Grace’s voice echoes. It is, but that won’t stop him. It is, but he feels at home among the fire. He’d thought he was on his way out, last legs – thought he was already living on stale, borrowed time. When he was a kid he used to look up at the sky and dream of seeing the world spread out beneath him – most kids did, in that decade of boundless human achievement and aspiration. Reaching for the stars. He used to dream of reaching them all. Maybe he’ll never get that far, but he’s certainly seen more than most; horrors and wonders alike. 

As he pads down the hall, he wonders what it would be like to die, but not end. What it would be like to go on living in new ways. One down, all to go. What promises would he make to someone coming after him – Graham O’Brien mark two; always carry a pickle and cheese sarnie, keep your friends close, and make every moment with them count. Don’t be scared. Even if you’re alone, don’t be scared. Even without her, don’t be scared. 

He wonders, in turn, what it would be like to endure, while everyone else dies. 

In his room, he finds a photograph sitting on the dresser. The way it’s placed; titled, dust dotted across its glossy, faded surface, it looks as if it’s been swept onto the wood by some invisible, determined breeze. Like fate, if such a thing exists. First ghosts, now fate – else, a sentient ship, thinking he deserves a look at something important. 

“This your doin’ then,” he mumbles, glaring up at the ceiling fondly, the way he’s seen the Doctor doing. Overcoming the initial weirdness concerning a ship that could think and feel, Graham had set about what he did best; being polite. Sometimes, he thinks he can hear gratitude. In a way, it’s like a haunted house. 

He lifts the photograph close to his face, fishing out his reading glasses. It’s old; black and white, faded and spotted, white fold marks cracked across the crumpled surface like bolts of lightning. Upon it, an old man stands with his chin up; a beguiling grin, a hand grasping the dark lapels of his suit jacket. On his arm is a young girl – maybe fifteen or sixteen – dark-featured and bright-eyed, beaming beautifully into the camera. In the background, faded to a blur, is a figure of a younger man, crouched and pulling a wacky expression, the two in the foreground oblivious to his interference. Graham turns the paper over to read, inscribed in a neat hand;  _ pictured: the Doctor, Susan (and Ian), 1963.  _

He knew upon first look who it must be, but the confirmation rattles him all the same. He takes a moment to linger on the eyes of the Doctor, and discovers a familiar sheen in the dark eyes, the thin, curling smile. He places it back upon the dresser, murmurs his thanks to the ship, and settles into an uneasy sleep. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I sort of hate this fic??? idk, maybe it's just because having the Doctor open up so much feels incredibly ooc and contrived but... oh well, angst happens


	3. Something More

_ The brows of men by the despairing light _

_ Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits _

_ The flashes fell upon them; some lay down _

_ And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest _

_ Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil'd. _

Sheffield, 2018

_ This woman is infuriating.  _ That was her first thought; infuriating, and entirely mad. She’d barged through the train carriage in the trails of a signed suit, and Yaz would have passed her off as a loon if it weren’t for her sharpness, the speed of her thoughts, her attention gravitating to all the important details – the acuteness of her investigation, and the way she took charge. Took it from her. She hadn’t been a fan of that part. 

The Doctor – as she inexplicably called herself – was completely unfathomable. She seemed to act like a kid half the time, and the other half like a mad, ruthless genius. Her night kept on getting better and better (or worse and worse, if the body count was anything to go by). This was it; something more, the something more she’s always wanted. The Doctor is something more; wicked quick, and strange. Wicked beautiful, too – in that harsh, ragged, jarring way. Maybe that isn’t the sort of thought she should be letting herself dwell on, especially since Ryan had insisted the Doctor is an alien, especially when all tonight’s overwhelming evidence is pointing to the existence of impossible things such as that. Impossible monsters, and impossible heroes. 

Yaz sits in the control booth of a crane, which definitely isn’t where she thought she’d end up tonight – perhaps ever in her life. She’s looking up at the silhouette of the Doctor, sharp against the bitter night, wind whipping at the flailing fabric of her coat, her fair hair. Yaz is spurred by the image – she thinks they all are – the slight figure of a woman, dwarfed by darkened, dusty rags, facing wide-stanced before an alien warrior, saving a life. Yaz is generally a rule-bound sort of person; calling things in, filling out the right forms – only tonight she’s nicked a police car past the end of her shift. She’s broken into a warehouse, an abandoned building, and a construction site. She’s climbed up a crane in the dead of night and spun it around to allow a mad (and quite possibly alien) woman to jump across like some sort of action hero. The thrill of it sits sharp, fizzling in her gut like a light she never realised could burn so bright. 

Life is just moments – they pass – but she never realised that moments can be so exciting, so packed full of adrenaline that she races to the next one, consuming it, as fast as she can. It’s what she’s always wanted to be; strong, taking charge, fearless and resolute in her justice and her decisions. She wants to help people – it’s all she’s ever wanted, really. If she’s going to be here – and she wants to be, she really does – then she’s going to make it count. She’s going to make things better. She’s going to do something more. 

...

The Time Vortex,  ∞

Yaz can’t sleep. It’s no wonder, after everything. When she closes her eyes, she sees a man half pale flesh, half rusted metal, snarling, with a remorseless, raging voice. She sees something worse, though – another face; one she thought she knew, turned sour. The Doctor’s face animated in a twisted version of her usual vigor – in biting anger, accusatory, challenging, wrathful. Brutal. Admitting to them all, finally, in harsh and scalding words – the truth. They were never a team, not really, she was just letting them play at being heroes as long as they followed her rules, and asked the right questions. It was her. It was always her, from the very beginning; standing up in the dark, in the sky, far above them. It was always her, with her points and her gold stars, with the occasional glance or smile or grasping hand – teasing approval, teasing closeness – leading Yaz along to the next fix of adrenaline. The next fix of her, and the way she made Yaz feel; powerful and right. More. 

She’s tired – tired of chasing, of trying to hold them all together like the family they used to be. She doesn’t want to leave, because she’s not quite sure who she is without the Doctor, not anymore. The Doctor, too, seems unable to face a world without them, and maybe that would be comforting if it hadn’t been for that silver glint in her eyes, that grimace of a smile stretched across her face as she made that choice, the sort of choice no one should have the power to make. For a long time, Yaz thought she wanted to be the sort of person who got to make choices like that – the big, important choices – saving lives and doing good. Now she sees the weight choices like that can have, the way power pulls upon the bones of those burdened with it. The sort of thing it turns you into as it drags you down through the muck, and the husk it spits out, behind the mask. _And_ _the spell is broken._

But she won’t leave, because isn’t this her fault for inviting her round for tea? She won’t leave, because she thinks she might love her, or maybe just the mystery of her – a mystery of irresistible scope and strangeness. The Doctor may just be the only mystery worth solving, despite all Yaz is leaving behind in following her.  _ More sensible prospects,  _ Claire’s voice grumbles, and Yaz wonders if she ever looks like that; pouting when she doesn’t get the Doctor’s attention, sitting outside the door to all her secrets with a pick in hand and a fierce desperation in her heart. Lovesick little girl, trailing after the first great figure who made her think she could be something more. Yaz is persistent, determined, but the more she asks, the more she pries, the darker the Doctor’s expression grows – like the enigma itself, increasing. 

This woman is infuriating. 

Yaz can’t sleep, so she ventures forth to find the woman who never does. 

The Doctor is pacing around the console with her hands behind her back, heels rocking, eyes trained forwards. Her fingers tangle where they’re clasped, and her pantlegs hang wide at her shins with each drawn, deliberate step. Yaz doesn’t announce herself, she wants to see if the Doctor will ignore her being there entirely, else fail to notice. She sits down on the steps, elbow resting on her knees, chin in her palm. 

The Doctor doesn’t stop her slow step of a dance as she says, gazing down, “hey Yaz.” 

She jumps, because she didn’t expect the Doctor to initiate. “Hey,” she murmurs, trying for bright. “Can’t sleep.”

“Can’t blame you,” the Doctor says, ceasing her pacing and coming to a halt in front of the console. She sets to work fiddling with the equipment there, checking a screen inlaid among the circuitry. “Still only halfway done,” she sighs, “those cyber coordinates are really complicated, don’t mesh with Time Lord tech  _ at all _ ,” she mutters. “But what about you, you doing okay?” 

“Yeah,” she answers automatically. “Bit nervous, I guess, of what we’re gonna find.”

“End of the world, probably,” the Doctor smiles, weak.

Yaz smirks, “we’ve dealt with worse.” A renewed smile in response, and the Doctor turns back to the console. Her nerves are tangible; threads of electricity woven through the air, sparking, snapping. “You okay?” Yaz asks. All at once, the fight seems to go out of her, and all the energy fizzles out into a bone-deep weariness; shoulders sagging, head drooping. 

A glance thrown at Yaz from her position on the stairs; “please,” she says, “let me take you home.” 

She’s desperate; every line in her body curving down in defeat, eyes soft and dark and imploring. Yaz shakes her head, quick and resolute. She lifts her face up from her palm and sits up straight, arms folded. “No,” she says, eyebrows drawn in an affronted manner, offended she’d even ask. “I made my choice a long time ago, and I’m never leaving you.”

If possible, the Doctor shrinks further into herself. There’s a flash of sadness across her face, or maybe longing. Yaz gets to her feet, concern wrought like iron through her features, aiming to comfort and wondering if, for once, the Doctor will let her try. “Stop torturing yourself,” she ventures, coming to stand alongside her. “As if we were ever going to leave you alone to face this.” 

“It was my choice to disobey the warning – whatever we find, that’s on my hands.” The Doctor’s hand grips a lever upon the console’s surface, slack-muscled and trembling. Her skin is near-translucent beneath the blue light. 

“No, it’s not,” Yaz reaches out her own hand, slowly, and places it over the Doctor’s. She releases her grip from the lever and spins her palm to face up, lacing her fingers through Yaz’s own. Both of them grip tight. “You’re not alone. So, maybe the team structure was never flat, but that doesn’t mean you have to be alone.” Yaz gazes up into the Doctor’s eyes, thinking that this is probably the first time they’ve touched each other in months. “It doesn’t mean we aren’t responsible too. We could’ve made that sacrifice, could’ve done more to stop you.” 

“Yaz,” the Doctor looks down at their hands, and parts them, “you couldn’t have stopped me even if you’d tried.” A shiver runs through her. Lately, with the Doctor acting as strange and as snappy as she has, Yaz had cause to wonder why she kept them around at all. She kept on thinking she was just going to drop them home and never come back because they’d finally pushed too hard, asked too many questions. She’d seen today that it would never happen – that she needs them as fiercely as Yaz needs her. Without each other, they’d be alone; driveless, directionless – lost without purpose or reason. Alone in the dark. She can’t decide whether it’s better or worse. If the Doctor didn’t care about them at all, Yaz could have dismissed it all as an act – some grand game to amuse a creature near enough immortal in her eyes. It would have stung, deeper than anything she’d ever felt, but it would have made sense. This doesn’t make sense at all. The Doctor cares about them so much that she’s willing to let billions of people die, and planets burn, just to protect them and their present, a planet that isn’t even her own. She’s got power the likes of which Yaz once found awe-inspiring, but that, now, has taken a turn towards disconcerting. It’s in the gleeful way she enacts her brutality, the smile and the snark. The Doctor always used to seem so righteous, but Yaz is coming to see that she’s always been towing a line between confidence and cold entitlement, between justice and cruelty. 

“Don’t be like that,” Yaz says, watching the Doctor as she turns away, hands resuming their place clasped and restless behind her back. “Please, I just want you to talk to me – to all of us.” She doesn’t reply, so Yaz sighs, trying for a different angle, voicing her thoughts. One of them has to do it. “All that stuff we did before, it was different, wasn’t it? Safer. I think maybe you were tryin’ to protect us, yeah?” The Doctor turns back, hands still working away behind her, face stark and shadowed blue, unreadable. “I mean, we got into scrapes, plenty of trouble and all that, but it was different.” They used to fancy themselves tourists following along in her wake, off to see the universe. Next stop everywhere. “But then things got personal. Things like the Dalek,” that was the first time they’d seen her delight in something’s destruction – teased it, goaded it, spoken to it like an old and hated enemy. “Things like the Master,” she blurts out, like it’s a curse, and hopes the Doctor won’t shut down at his mention. “It’s like maybe you’re more than you wanted to show us.” But hadn’t she always wanted something more? The Doctor is about as more as things get – bending time, saving worlds, and all those little hints that she was something stranger, the slipped anecdotes, the sparks of ancient anger, never quite catching. Until today. Yaz tilts her head, widens her eyes, “Why did you keep so many secrets for so long? You’re still hiding stuff from us, even now.” 

There’s a moment where the Doctor is frozen; fight or flight, calculating. She takes a step towards Yaz and says, quiet; “I’m sorry. I know, I should’ve told you a lot of things, maybe from the outset.” Her hand is on the console again, nails digging under a bolt as if she can ground herself in the machinery, or in the sensation of touch. “That I’m pushing three-thousand instead of forty, that I’ve had fourteen different faces, that my people are one of the oldest civilisations in the universe and that now, they’re… well,” her eyes dart back up to Yaz’s, fearful, “it doesn’t matter,” she mutters. 

“So why didn’t you?” 

“Because I didn’t want to be all that anymore. I just wanted to be your mate, you know,” she smiles, gaze far away, “just a traveller.” 

Yaz knows how it feels, that need to run. She’s doing it right now; an endless sabbatical, running from her family and her career and her past. But the Doctor’s past is larger, and far more malicious. She runs from it, not at a gentle, frolicking jog, but a constant, bone-wearing, chest-burning sprint. Yaz nods, and closes the gap with another step. Every movement she makes is calculated, deliberate – because although Yaz is tired of casting those quiet, warm smiles her way, and tired of the lies and the anger and the avoidance, she still wants to know. “It feels like we’re standing on the edge of something, you know? Something big. And maybe…”  _ Maybe we won’t make it out, or maybe I’m just getting tired of trying to impress you. _ “Maybe there’s something I need to tell you before we step over it.” 

They lock eyes for a long moment, very close. The Doctor is the first to break contact, eyes flickering down to where their hands rest on the edge of the console, closer still, and she pulls it back. Pulls away. Yaz tries to stop the fluttering in her chest, the sinking of her stomach. “I’m sorry,” the Doctor echoes, tired, almost a shudder. “It can’t happen.” But she always knew that. The Doctor was never a person to Yaz as much as she was an idea; the idea of being more, and doing good, and being sure. You can’t expect an idea to love you back. 

“Right. Yeah, ‘course. Guess I always knew that,” she murmurs, her turn to look down, to watch her fingers trailing listlessly over metal panels and wires. She can feel the Doctor’s eyes upon her; regretful, pitying. The pity stings. “It’s just that, where we’re going, I thought it might be good to say it first.” 

“Yeah.” Several times, the Doctor opens and closes her mouth, about to speak before the words die in her throat, until finally, it all comes out in a rush; “I’m sorry Yaz, really I am, but I can’t. I’m not good at all that, relationships. I’m just good at hurting people.” Yaz looks up and watches her, hunched, bare forearms folded, the dark waistcoat collar sharp below her pale face, flat and miserable. “I’ve done plenty of that.”

“Besides,” Yaz smiles, “the age gap is atrocious.”

“Right,” the Doctor chuckles, shy, “yeah. Yeah it is.” She buries her face in her hands in a sudden, feverish movement. “I always do this,” she groans, melancholic. The Doctor leans back against the console and sinks slowly to the floor, legs coming to rest in a tangle on the cold, ridged metal beneath. 

“What d’you mean?” Yaz asks, seating herself down alongside her. 

“I really tried with you three, I did – I was gonna leave you back on Earth and go and search for my ship, but the stupid stenza tech malfunctioned. Then I was gonna get you back home and leave you be, but I just had to stick around, had to make you feel sorry for me, and then –”

“Hey,” she interrupts, “we knew you were lonely but that doesn’t mean we came along because we felt sorry for you. We wanted to come,” she smiles, “how could we not with all the amazing things you’d shown us, all the amazing things we’d done?”

The Doctor’s mouth is pressed into a thin line, quivering. “Of course,” she mutters, “how could you not – and how could I not.” Hands at her temples, grasping at her hair, she repeats; “I always do this.” 

“What are you talkin’ about?” 

“I used to bring people aboard the TARDIS all the time – offer them the whole universe, you know, show off a bit, try and get them to tag along, see the sights. But, when things get nasty, you know, really dangerous – like facing off against a cyber army in the middle of a war zone,” she looks at Yaz pointedly, “they never listen to me. They never go home. They don’t let me keep them safe because I’ve made them too… I don’t know, too loyal? Too reckless, maybe.”

“Like we’re trying to live up to you,” Yaz nods, knowing, despite the Doctor’s anguish, that she won’t back down. She won’t leave. “Or maybe you just pick the good sort,” she nudges her playfully, and a begrudging smile creeps across the Doctor’s lips. 

“Or maybe I just make people dangerous. Maybe I never learn, certainly seems that way, with the way all this keeps on repeating. I keep making the same mistakes, and I never learn.” Yaz doesn’t quite know what to say to that, because she doesn’t know enough about the Doctor to have any idea of the scope of mistakes to which she’s referring – the amount of people she’s lost. A long pause, as the Doctor seems to weigh a decision in her mind. Yaz doesn’t interrupt, worried she’ll sway her back into silence. “Maybe I can learn from one now, though,” she looks over at Yaz. Their faces are close where they’re sitting on the ground, the sides of their bodies pressed up against one another, console thrumming gently at their backs. “I know I haven’t been open with you, so,” she shrugs, “got any questions for me, Yaz? Anythin’ at all?” 

Yaz opens her mouth in a suppressed gasp. Finally,  _ finally,  _ something. Still, she doesn’t want to push her luck, doesn’t want to start with anything that might make the Doctor think better of the exercise, turn her cold. She doesn't want to ask about the Master, or the Doctor’s home planet, both of which seem to be sore spots. She’ll find out someday though – she’s a good investigator – assuming she survives to ask. Her mind settles on something recent, something important that she thinks the Doctor’s been hiding for a long while, until necessity deemed it unavoidable to reveal. “Okay,” she begins, casual, “are you, like, telepathic or something?” 

A pause. “Yeah,” she answers, clearly reluctant. It must be a new sensation for her – a conversation unshrouded, unguarded. “Yeah I am, a bit.” 

“Can you read my thoughts?” she says, a bit too abruptly to be passed off as merely curious. 

“I said a bit,” she Doctor says, defensive. “So no, well – not usually, err,” she meets Yaz’s eyes and blinks hurriedly away, “sometimes. When they’re loud.” 

Yaz feels herself flush. “Err, right. Okay. Telepathic,” she whistles out a breath, “right.” She adjusts her posture against the metal behind her, legs crossed, pushing her head back into the cold. “Is that what you did to Shelley, then? Saw into his mind by touching him?” 

“Yeah.”

“That’s sort of amazing” she grins. 

Her smile is wry, muted. “I don’t like makin’ a habit of it – not a very nice thing to do to someone, really.”

“Is it something your species can do, then?” She’s wary of pushing the subject further, because species strays awfully close to a mysterious home, and an old friend, gone a very different way. 

“Yeah, latent telepathic abilities. Sort of a big thing back, err,” her voice drops to a whisper, “back home. That’s why human language is so weird, it’s all just,” and she mimes retching, fingers splayed and dangling from her mouth, “words, you know.” Yaz smiles, and the Doctor returns it. She seems to be enjoying it, almost, like her whole being is lighter. Yaz wonders if the Doctor used to share things before, with those people she’d lost. One, apparently, to the cybermen. It’a strange thought, those others, because for a long time Yaz had assumed that when the Doctor talked about the people she’d lost, she meant her family, but then came the anecdotes. There were always omissions there, other people accidently mentioned. Other humans. When she or any of the others asked her to elaborate, well, it was met with the Doctor’s usual tolerance for what she deemed as ‘irrelevant questions.’ Of course, it made sense that there were others, even before they knew how old the Doctor really is. I made sense, in observing the speed at which the Doctor snapped up new travelling companions when her friends were otherwise engaged. Ada, Noor, Tahira – generally, Yaz noticed, it seemed to be young women. The Doctor’s eye did tend to wander. “That’s not to say I don’t use it when I talk to you lot, it’s not exactly something you can switch off. Sometimes I pick things up, sometimes you might pick stuff up from me, too – you know, like interference, though you probably wouldn’t pick up on it consciously.” A harried smile, a slight widening of the eyes. The Doctor, Yaz realises, seems to think she’s said too much. 

But she won’t let her off that easy. “How’d you mean?”

“It’s like,” she swallows, rolling her tongue in her mouth as if she’s pushing down a bad taste. “– suggestion, I don’t know. There’s a reason people tend to trust me. Follow my lead. It’s all just out there, in the psychic subspace, leaking. I can’t really control it, you lot just don’t really have the defences.” Yaz stares at her for a moment in silence, trying to decipher just how far the spell spreads, trying to decide just how strange a creature the Doctor is. Maybe this wasn’t such a safe question after all. “See, that’s just what I’m talking about,” she sighs, slumping her shoulders. “I always pull people along, even if I don’t really mean to, it just happens.” It would, in a way, explain the instant trust Yaz felt towards her – the gravitation that was more than an appreciation of wit and a foolish crush. It would explain why the Doctor’s figure cast such a striking line of rebellion against the dark and why, all of a sudden, the impossible seemed possible, and they were running after aliens in the night. It would explain why the sound of her voice makes Yaz feel brave and safe and  _ more _ . Sometimes, that pull she feels when she’s with the Doctor, it’s as if the universe is calling out; a call like a pull, or a hand around hers. An urge to run. She can command a room into submission with a look, despite the stripes and the stupid trousers and the expressions of youthful animation, because when she stands, steel-eyed and dark-smiled, the space she takes up is bigger than her bones, and it hangs in the air like a presence. “I know that it happens, even when I don’t mean to, and maybe that’s worse,” the Doctor whispers. 

Yaz’s voice comes out dry, raspy; “I don’t think it’s worse.”  _ Just strange,  _ she thinks,  _ just alien, which was always part of the deal.  _

The corner of her lip quirks up, something close to sinister. Brittle, as if she’s about to snap, tell Yaz she doesn’t know anything at all in a voice near a snarl, patronising;  _ how long have you been here?  _ She suppresses it. “Thanks,” is all she says. 

Yaz’s mind finds an easier question – something impersonal on the surface, but one that fills her with dread all the same.  _ Old Time Lord trick,  _ the Doctor’s voice echoes, a grim smirk on her face. Shelley’s wide-eyed terror, gasping for breath, as he saw his own end. “And you showed Shelley his death, his own future. How did you do that?” 

The Doctor seems to grapple with the concept for a moment. Yaz gets the feeling they saw a great many things today the Doctor would rather they hadn’t. “I showed him a memory, or a premonition, I suppose. One extremely probable premonition. The future’s just another sort of memory.” 

“You can see people’s memories, then?” It adds a whole new layer to the sentiment that had been unsettling the three of them for so long; her, knowing everything about them, and them, knowing nothing about her. 

“Hypothetically. Again, I don’t make a habit of it. I haven’t been messing with your heads, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Oh, but it would have been convenient, wouldn’t it? Them, who ask far too many questions, and her, who sometimes let things slip… Yaz has to believe her, though, there’s already enough distrust, enough disenchantment, rooted between them. The Doctor seems to pick up on what she’s thinking, maybe too entirely to be unaided, which does nothing to comfort Yaz. 

“I never would,” the Doctor assures her. 

“I know.” But she doesn’t, not really.  _ Not even a little bit.  _ She steers the conversation somewhere clearer; an innocent preposition disguising a deeper worry. “Can you see my future?” she asks. “Or, you know,” she smiles, “an extremely probable premonition.” Because, despite her promise to stay with the Doctor, she really doesn’t want to die. She doesn’t want her parents to find out that, in reality, she was never signed on with an intelligence agency at all, that she was just running, apparently aimless. She doesn’t want them to think she’s done something stupid. She doesn’t want to leave Sonya alone, always wondering. 

“Nah, not really,” the Doctor replies. A wire hangs down from the edge of the console overhead, she takes it between the tips of her fingers and tugs at it, idly. “You’re too complicated. Maybe when we first met, if I could’ve seen your time laid out in that moment, it would’ve been clear. Most humans are – just a long line heading towards one,” her thin lips curl, “very probable premonition. But these things move about all the time, timelines twisting around one another, interfering, cancelling out. Add time travel to the mix and you have less of a line and more of a tangled ball of possibility – that’s what you are, Yasmin Khan,” she rolls the name along her tongue, a savoured sound. “All tied in knots, a thousand equally probable yet extremely unlikely beginnings and endings and meetings and narrow,  _ narrow  _ escapes. I go on a lot about non-interference, but it’s impossible to walk through time without creating ripples,” she twists the dark wire between her fingers, curling it around pale flesh, “impossible to drag those threads along without tangling them together, changing things. It’s hard to keep track of it all.” The wire’s so tight that it presses grooves into her skin, bluish purple at the indent, bulging either side. “An infinitum of possible moments pressed into one,” she mutters, song-like and thin. 

“Is that what it’s like? Being a,” she falters, just for a moment. Increasing the enigma. “– a Time Lord?” The Doctor doesn’t answer at first, her eyes are still trained on the curling of the wire, ever tighter, suffocating. Yaz continues, “being outside of time instead of in it?” 

“I suppose that’s part of it. But I’m just one renegade,” she smiles, “they’re an empire,” and it slides off her face, curdled into something dark. “They controlled –  _ control _ ,” she corrects “– time. Enforce it, shape it,  _ preside _ over it; never interfering, never even trying to help or to see any of it.” The way her fist is curled against the floor, her brows laced, Yaz senses a deep-seated anger, and thinks she can understand it; feeling like nobody in the world is doing enough, just standing there and watching and ruling while others suffer. Apparently, the sentiment isn’t an Earth-only phenomena. “Is that why you ran away?” she asks. 

The Doctor sighs; “I just thought I could do more good out here, among the stars. Help, instead of just watching.” It’s exactly how Yaz felt, stepping out of her flat to grab some groceries, and stepping into the breadth of the universe instead. Leaving it all behind. She’s done it more than once, run away – but not because she’s weak. Once, she ran because the world was too much, the second time, because it could never be enough after everything she’d seen. It could never be enough after seeing that stark silhouette in the sky  _ (the stratosphere, alone) _ against the stars, defiant. It could never be enough, after hearing the call. “Sometimes I think I haven’t really done any good at all, like I’m chasing my mistakes round and round. Always fixing the mess I made in step one.”

“That’s not true,” Yaz assures her at once. With the amount of lives she’s seen the Doctor save, the universe must be better for her presence, for their presence. Though better, as she’s come to realise, isn’t always so easily quantifiable. Letting an innocent man die in the past, so that she can have a future, standing by and watching an injustice, so that a movement can be born. Letting a boy burn, or a species starve, or an entire race die. She used to think justice was clear cut, used to follow that edge to the blade-point and weaponise it. She used to look at the Doctor and her certainty – her kindness, her ruthlessness – like a guiding light, something dazzling. Now that she’s seen the weariness underneath, and the cruelty, she isn’t sure there can be anything so simple as doing ‘good.’ Good always comes at the expense of something else, and justice always has a price. Heroes, under the visage, are just people, and people are never sure. 

For a moment, the Doctor looks at her as if she’s about to rebuff her, ask her, perhaps, how she could possibly know what good is. Yaz shivers at the age in her eyes, and braces herself, because heroes are just people, and people can be cruel. It looks as if it causes the Doctor physical pain to refrain from the instinct. “That’s nice of you to say,” she mutters, “but it isn’t that simple.” 

“I guess nothing is –” actions and feelings alike. Limerence fades, veils lift – and even the most melodious of calls fall out of key. Even the strongest of spells can be broken. “– but you have to keep trying.” 

The Doctor nods, seeming to consider Yaz’s words, though in reality Yaz can see her mind is far away, still shut behind that locked door with Yaz, at the threshold, breaking and entering – or attempting to. “Going into this place, it’s going to be dangerous – more than usual. There’s quite a few,” she swallows, “probable premonitions, in which we don’t all make it out alive.” Yaz nods. Probable, she said, not guaranteed. Not fixed. Not certain, so there’s still room for hope, abiding. At her resolution, the Doctor smiles, sad and knowing. Piercing. “Please, Yaz, let me take you home,” and she wraps Yaz’s hand in her own, pressing their arms together. “I don’t want to lose you.” 

Yaz turns to her and steels her gaze; “I need to do this, I need to go with you. It’s my fight too.” Because she’s led this being to make a choice – perhaps a selfish one, perhaps not a good one – but it’s been made all the same. She could pretend that she has no obligation to see this through; could go back to her flat, to her family, her job. She could fall back into old responsibilities; little lives and crimes and ways of helping. Clear-cut justice and impossible heroes. She could fall back onto that straight, dreary line running down to an extremely probable, unavoidable premonition, but she won’t. She won’t, because she wants to do something more, wants to be something more, and she is – a tangle of possibilities, instead of a line. A wire wrapped around her finger. “I won’t pretend I’m not scared, ‘cause I am. We all are,” Yaz gazes up at the Doctor, head tilted down, dark eyes under dark lashes. Yaz watches the breath catch in the Doctor’s throat as she whispers “please, just let me be brave.”

She won’t leave, because even now, the universe is calling. 

...

Yaz stays a while after that, in silence. After three thousand years, the Doctor concludes, it would be strange if she didn’t find certain turns of phrase familiar, like echoes of the past. In a life like hers; long and cyclic, familiarity becomes a constant companion. Like a name repeated, it loses its meaning. 

The Doctor discovers that, in actual fact, Yaz was exhausted, and had perhaps just been wanting to get something off her chest. Despite her adverse attitude to the act, the Doctor feels a little lighter too. Yaz drifts off against her shoulder, their arms still wrapped in one anothers, fingers still eloped. Above them, the wire droops down in an arc, twisted through the air. The line it carves through the light is beautiful. 

After a time, the TARDIS begins to chirp a soft alarm, and the Doctor disentangles herself carefully from Yaz’s form. She unclasps their fingers and lowers her gently to the ground, one hand cradling her head, fingers amongst the trailing, statisised fragments of a once-meticulous updo. She presses two fingers to her temple – cold hands to warm skin – and shows her something. In turn, the Doctor marvels at the tangled mess of her; an infinitum of possibilities pressed into a moment. 

A folded arm, a twisted hand, a hair flickering in and out of place. A smile, pushed slightly to the left, or the folds of her shirt, rippled to a different pattern by the air. Inconsequential anachronisms, the wire above them twisted into a slightly different path, but always abiding by the promise. With her, whatever happens. 

Following another strand, the Doctor finds more premonitions, diminishing in their probability as time passes their branching paths. In one tempting fruition, she flies the TARDIS back to Sheffield and lets the ship fade away, leaving Yasmin Khan asleep on her bed, safe along that dreary line, unravelling. In another, no less tempting, they’re still awake, and the Doctor has given into a confession made before stepping over the looming edge. They’re locked in a comforting embrace; one filled with victorious love, and the other with drowning guilt, because she always does this. She’s always good at hurting people. 

Instead, in the premonition she’s chosen, becoming memory by the moment, she takes her coat from the ground and wraps it around Yaz’s body. The scarf, once a shield, becomes a pillow, folded and slipped beneath her head. 

The ship hums, and a feeling burrows at the base of her neck, resting behind her eyes – a knowing smile, almost teasing. 

“Shut up,” she mutters, dragging her fingers along the edge of the console. She smiles, and sets to work on the next stage of translating the coordinates. 

...

There’s a chill at the side of her head, two points of contact, smooth and icy. Ice-cream pain. It shows her things, a gentle intrusion. Faces flash before her eyes, smiling and calling something over and over. Lots of girls – pretty girls. Eyes, tending to wander. People that were swept up by the Doctor, the idea of her, taking the hand that leads, following the voice that whispers to run. Answering the call. In her dream, she smiles, and wonders if she’ll remember any of it when she wakes. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which I take the harmless series 11 marketing slogan and make it... sinister :0  
> 


	4. An Impossible Choice

_ All earth was but one thought—and that was death _

_ Immediate and inglorious; and the pang _

_ Of famine fed upon all entrails—men _

_ Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh; _

_ The meagre by the meagre were devour'd, _

Sheffield, 2018

He stands by the door and waits. Face nearly touching the glazed glass, Ryan watches the street for the sign of a familiar car, a familiar gait; maybe a word of comfort, or an apology. He’s learnt not to expect much, when it comes to his dad. Instead, he has her. The Doctor, who, he’s come to accept, is most definitely an alien. She stands beside him, edging her way forwards on uncertain feet hidden beneath those ridiculously oversized, battered trousers. Ryan likes her, despite her being totally weird. She’s been helpful these past few days, sticking by them, even though she didn’t have to. Ryan suspects she feels guilty about his nan, which isn’t fair at all, because that’s entirely his fault. Blinking lights in the forest, he couldn’t resist. He just had to go and touch it. He thinks Graham probably blames him too. At least the Doctor said she would've done the same. Despite the horror, and the way it had all ended, that night spent chasing Tim Shaw across the city had been exhilarating. All the while his heart had been hammering, pumping him full of adrenaline, beating in time to the DNA bomb embedded in his bones – it was the most exciting thing that had happened to him in a long time, maybe ever. He’d done things he’d never thought himself capable of doing – like climbing a crane.  _ Can’t ride a bike, _ he muses,  _ can climb a crane.  _ He knows Yaz feels the same, because she’s been hanging around too, under pretence of helping out with funeral arrangements, of course, but Ryan thinks she just wants to stick close to the Doctor in case there’s any more world-saving to be getting on with. He could do with some world-saving right about now, it might take his mind off things. 

The Doctor approaches him, hunched and weary. He hasn’t seen her sleep since that night, slumped on his nan’s couch, breathing golden light. She’s been watching them, these past few days; presiding over the hilltop on the cliff, watching him try and fail, and try again, falling to the grass in a tangle of metal and limbs; watching Graham bustle about brewing endless cups of tea, leafing through old books without any sort of commitment, spending idle moments trying to stave off the act of thinking. She’s watched Yaz, too, swinging by after work with something she’s baked at home, with kind words and a helping hand. The way the Doctor’s watching them, it’s like she’s calculating something, puzzling them out. Sometimes, though, her eyes seem so far from the present that Ryan concludes she can’t be watching them at all, but rather peering back into the past, puzzling over some impossible choice. She stays, and Ryan is glad of it, though he wonders what she wants with them – three ordinary, boring people. Maybe she’s stuck, or she finds humans interesting. Maybe she’s just lonely. 

She asks him what he’s waiting for, and he explains; his dad, but he won’t come. He never does. 

The Doctor stays for the funeral, standing up the back, watching the proceedings. She seems to fade, in moments like this – just part of the backdrop. People don’t notice her strange, ragged clothes, her penetrating, sombre gaze, or the air of humble melancholy that seems to radiate from her like a sickness. After Graham’s speech, Ryan looks around and locks eyes with the Doctor. Her smile is small, and sad – she seems torn, one foot turned towards the door as if she’s about to slink away. About to leave. Ryan shakes his head minutely, to which she nods, and roots herself to the spot, hands clasped in front of her, fiddling with her hands. 

The Time Vortex,  ∞

Ryan hasn’t slept. He knows it’s been a few hours now since they kicked off from the 19th century, and began their journey towards Earth’s doomed future. He’s been agonising over a conversation in his mind, playing out its paths, but in all of them he ends up getting hurt. The thing is, it’s hard to have a conversation with the Doctor in your head – she’s too unpredictable, especially of late. 

He has to do it sooner or later – where they’re going, there won’t be time for questions. You have to catch the Doctor when she doesn’t have an excuse, otherwise she’ll brush questions away with a flick and a smile. It’s why she likes to do maintenance at night, very loudly, so they can’t interrupt her in those empty hours. Ryan knows, perhaps better than most, that you have to say things to people, because you don’t know what missed chance might be your last. 

He pads down the steps to the console room without bothering to disguise his footfalls. She starts and looks around, peering out from behind the central undulating crystal dipping up and down from the ceiling, keeping time. 

“Hey Doctor,” he calls, trying to be friendly, unabrasive.

Her eyes widen, and she points hurriedly at a bundle of fabric cast in shadow beneath the console. “Shh!” she hisses, and Ryan realises she’s pointing at Yaz, curled up under the Doctor’s coat, fast asleep. He stifles a laugh. 

“No way,” he whispers, sharp and clear. “I’m so takin’ a photo, she’s gonna be so embarrassed.” 

The Doctor smiles. Warm, and Ryan is flooded with relief. Compared to the scenarios in his head, this is a good start. “You leave her be, Ryan Sinclair,” she grumbles, wry and playful. 

She walks up to the steps to meet him as he asks, voice appropriately subdued, “how are the coordinates comin’ along?”

“She’s sayin’ eighty percent,” she shrugs, “maybe less than an hour.”

“Right,” he nods, and for a silent moment, casts his gaze to the floor. The Doctor shifts her feet impatiently, or perhaps uncomfortably. “Err, I wanted to say something, before we get onto step two.” He glances up at the Doctor, her expression closed and calculating. Uncertain. She nods, looking past him. Not listening. He’s used to that. Ryan clears his throat and shifts his weight back, leaning against the rail. “I wanted to say I’m sorry,” he says, quite quickly, like the words are fighting to get out. The Doctor wrinkles her brow in confusion, but he presses on. “I shouldn’t have suggested killin’ Shelley, I know it weren’t the right thing to do. I know things aren’t that simple and, err,” he pauses, searching for the right words. Kind words – the sort his nan would have had on hand and dictated perfectly. “– I know things aren’t easy for you.” 

She looks crestfallen, smaller than ever. She slinks back, spine curved and head down. “Don’t apologise to me,” she mumbles. 

“Okay,” he says, confused. 

“I’m sorry I snapped at you, Ryan,” she says, not looking at him. “It wasn’t you I was angry with, not really – you probably know that, but I think I should still say it.”

“S’alright,” he mumbles, “team structure was never really flat, we all knew that. You’re just takin’ us along for a ride.”

It was the wrong thing to say, she looks hurt, a blow dealt low and cold in her stomach. “That’s not true,” she says, hands in her pockets, straight-backed and pensive. It reminds him of the way she used to stand in those intervening days back on Earth when they first met. Silent, calculating something behind the eyes. “I know I haven’t been very nice to be around lately, and I’m sorry for that too.”

“S’alright,” he repeats, though it isn’t, not really. She’s the women who brought them together, changed their lives, made them better – but made them worse, too. He remembers finding Tibo back home, the abandonment and listlessness he was feeling – the sort of feeling Ryan promised himself he’d never inflict upon anyone, not after it was inflicted upon him so many times over. The universe is incredible, and vast, but still he feels torn. He doesn’t really have a life back home anymore – no mind-numbing warehouse job, no NVQ, despite what he tells his mates, and of his mates, he hasn’t talked to any of them except Tibo in months. The Doctor’s the woman who, latey, they haven’t been able to trust – have been stepping around cautious and wary for months now, like treading on thin, blackened ice. She’s been quiet, irritable, performative – mardy, as Yaz would say – and after a while they’ve grown tired of trying to pry her out of it. She’s the woman who’s thousands of years old, apparently, but still hasn’t learnt to talk through her feelings. It makes Ryan feel a little better about himself. 

“Are you sure I can’t take you home?” She asks, breaking his silence. Her tone is tentative, sad, like she knows he won’t agree, but she has to try anyway. Peace of mind. “I’ll be back for you as soon as all this is sorted – then we can go back to traveling, just like we used to, yeah?” She smiles weakly and looks up at him from her shrunken position, halfway in shadow. The pale orange from the console casts a meagre streak of gold across her cheek, highlighting the sunken skin over her bones. Sharper than usual. Ship and pilot alike, fading. He wishes she would tell him what’s wrong. 

Things may have been better before, but he’s not sure if he wants it back – at least, not in the same way. He’s not some directionless kid anymore, freshly moored in the throes of grief, feeling like he doesn’t belong anywhere, and can’t offer the world a thing. He’s better than that, he’s seen it – the Doctor’s shown it. At his pensive frown, she leaps into a new, sympathetic suggestion. “Or, you know, you could take a break. I know these things can’t last forever,” she shifts, wrapping her fingers around her wrist, moving to distract, “and I can tell you’ve been asking yourself whether this is the best place for you right now. I can’t answer that for you but just know you’re always welcome.” She smiles up at him, dropping her arm back to her side; “there’ll always be a place for you here, if you want it.” 

“Thanks,” he says, “I just don’t want to ruin things. I mean, If I stop travelling then Graham’ll probably feel like he has to stay home and look after me – I just don’t know.”

She nods, taking perhaps a moment longer than necessary to process his words, and work them into a response. “Have you told any of the others how you’re feeling?”

He resists the urge to laugh in her face.  _ Take some of your own advice, mate. _ The thought flashes upon his face as a smirk and a fleeting glance cast her way, but if she notices she doesn’t say so. “Talked to Yaz, a bit. I don’t think she really gets it though – I mean look at her,” he points to the bundle of pale fabric curled beneath the console, and the mass of dark hair trailing from the top of a face buried deep into the folds, “she’s right at home.” 

The Doctor chuckles, “so she is.” 

“Maybe it’s silly to want mundane over all this” he gestures lazily at his surroundings; the cavernous space of geometric beauty; glassy crystals, glowing, gold-veined vesicles run through with wire and metal. Half-machine, half-natural. “– but mundane can be good, I think. I’m not talking about packing shelves and going for groceries and all that – that’s proper boring – I mean hanging out with your mates, getting up in the morning and going to sleep at night and,” he chuckles, “knowing which it is, and where you are. Belonging, you know?” Perhaps she doesn’t, which only makes him feel more obligated to stay. 

“Hmm,” she acknowledges him, ponderous. “I’ve never really been good with mundane, or living all in order like that. Well, I say that –” she wrinkles her nose, tilts her brow, launching into anecdote; “I was a professor in Bristol for over seventy years, and I lived on Darrilium for twenty-five. Lovely planet, Darrilium, I should take you sometime…” she trails off, eyes once again fixed on her twisting fingers, “once all this is sorted.” She looks back up at Ryan, eyes earnest, “and I will, you know, sort it,” she shrugs, “I always do. I’m good at sorting things. I’ve just gotta bring down an intergalactic empire of killing machines bent on the destruction of the human race.” By the end of the phrase, her voice is rapid, words stumbling over one another to enter the subdued, mechanical hum. She inhales – deep and slow – then sits herself down on the stairs, one knee up to her chest, her other leg draping onto a lower step. The steps are new, relatively speaking, and extremely impractical, especially for someone as trip-prone as he is. He likes them, though – they’ve got character, even if it is a little abrasive, incongruent. Inconvenient. Every part of the ship reflects its owner. 

“So no big deal then,” Ryan smirks, sitting down beside her. 

“Nope,” she smiles, voice thin, almost choked, “no big deal.” 

“But you’ve fought them before, right – the cybermen?” 

“Yeah, heaps of times. Actually, it was cybermen that killed me last time I regenerated. Very painful, would  _ not  _ recommend.” 

“Don’t have to tell me twice.” 

She smirks, continuing to speak in her idle, meandering manner – as if the words are leaking from her, kept in for so long. “They’re an inevitable concept, like Robo-Frankenstein said. Most vaguely human-adjacent lifeforms reach a point in their cultural and technological lifetimes when they start to improve themselves, integrate themselves with technology, connect to one another. Soon enough, individuality fades into a singular directive; conquer, convert. Upgrade. They really do think they’re helping – if you could call what they do thinking. There’s no emotion behind any of it – all that’s stripped away because the act of becoming  _ ‘better,’ _ ” she spits, “is too painful, too maddening, to bear. It doesn’t happen the same way for every species – the term ‘cybermen’ covers a whole host of empires, originating from different species, different planets. Mondas was the first. No matter how many times I face them, I never win, not completely. Maybe I could have,” she rasps, fingers white-knuckled where they rest, taut and triangular against the metal beneath, “if I hadn’t handed over their greatest weapon.”

“But, if the world ends with the cybermen, how can it still end with the dregs, and Tranquility?” he asks. In his mind, he tries to decide which is worse. A natural evolution into monsters, or a forced transformation. A slow degradation of the Earth – the privileged leaving for the stars, and the poor for dead – or a war that tore it all apart, indiscriminately. 

“Two possible futures,” she shrugs, “it’s sort of difficult to explain.”

“How’s the progress going on this coordinates?” he asks, innocently enough.

“Eighty three percent,” she admits. 

“So we sorta got time, don’t we?”

“I suppose we do.” A breath before she begins, mustering her energy in splayed fingers, raised hands. Animated. “All these moments, different outcomes, they exist parallel to one another. The time vortex is a messy place, and time isn’t a straight line like you might think. It’s more of a,” she pauses, hands held wide and tense, as if gripping an invisible ball. “– actually,” she mutters, “no – that analogy’s rubbish. It’s just messy, I’ll leave it at that. Point is, all these potential events, potential streams – or threads – of time, they exist all at once. We can visit them, weave through them, rearrange them, even – unless they’re fixed, or we’re going back on our own personal timelines. There’s always exceptions.” 

“Sounds a bit confusing,” he says, sarcastic, with a smile. 

“I did warn you,” she smiles in return. “The dregs can still happen, so can the cybermen. So can every foiled Dalek invasion, meteor strike, plague outbreak – anythin’ you can think of. All the time, they’re possibilities.” 

“Cheery.”.

“Well, it’s a good job I’m here, isn’t it?” she exclaims, hands up and eyes wide. “Your world’s a lot more difficult to end when you’ve got me holdin’ it together – and you,” she adds, hastily, “of course. Me and my mates.” Her voice goes quiet, “always me and my mates.” 

He hesitates. “‘Cept it’s not really, is it? We’re just following you, even if, at the start it was you following us.” Hanging around in those intervening, black days, watching. Deciding, he realises now, if they were worth whatever it is she’s feeling now as she looks at him, despairing, begging him to let her take him home. “Why d’you care so much about Earth, anyway?”  _ and us,  _ he implies, and he thinks she understands his meaning. 

“Because you’re brilliant.” She says it like it’s a simple fact, irrefutable. “The Earth, and humans, and everything about you is just  _ brilliant _ . It’s different where I’m from, I suppose.”

“Gallifrey?” he prompts, trying not to sound too eager. 

“Yeah,” she mutters, almost spits. “Not a lot of freedom, or family, or any of that. It was home,” and her voice drops to a bare whisper, gossamer thread, “but it wasn’t a very nice place.” 

“That why you won’t take us?” She doesn’t answer, just stares out at the dwindling gold of the console, pillars pulsing a deepening blue. He tries to change the subject. “Is Earth really that great?”

“Really,” she affirms, eyebrows raised in solemnity, in sincerity. 

“So you try to, I don’t know – steer time? Keep the Earth around, keep us around?”

She nods, expression vague; “sorting out fair play, across the universe.” 

He frames his question in curiosity, but there’s anger underneath. “How can you know what’s fair and what isn’t?” At the subdued expression on the Doctor’s face, Ryan realises she doesn’t know at all. Watching them burn now, or tomorrow. Sacrificing the people you love, and everything you know, for nameless billions. “What would’ve happened to us if you’d let Shelley die, or kept the Cyberion?” 

She takes a moment; a finger traced through the air, a flicker of the eyes, like she’s mapping something out. “If Shelley died then and there, we would have been set on a new path. It’s hard to say whether you still would have existed or not, but keep in mind, the chances of you existing at all are so small they’re near enough negligible, mathematically speaking – let alone the specific sequence of circumstances that would have led you to a forest in Sheffield and a light in the sky, to me, with the same set of experiences, making the same choices. It would be impossible, really, for your existence to survive that, and more impossible, still, if the cybermen had sent some of their fleet back through the rift and attacked 1816, bringing their invasion forwards centuries early.” She pauses, looking at him. In that moment, Ryan can see the wonder she’d referenced etched across her face, threaded through every feature. She’s laid bare, unfolded, and Ryan marvels at the fact that he ever doubted her intentions. The way their eyes lock – one in curiosity, the other in fierce, deeply-wrought worry – it echoes a stare they shared across a church hall choked with grief. A nod across the crowd, an acknowledgement, and she’d stayed. She’d decided. He wonders if she’s paying for that decision now, else expecting to very soon. 

“But you wouldn’t have met us either, if you’d killed Shelley – and you would never have even known what Earth is if it’d been taken over by Cybermen in 1816.”

Another sigh, and a warped expression – a frown both in thought and in discomfort. “That’s just the thing, I’m not like you. I sort of just… persist. Cause doesn’t have the same effect, not on my people. This universe was anchored in their biology, guided by them – their planet sits at the epicentre of time.” He notices the way she doesn’t count herself among them, her people. For a long time it hadn’t bothered him, knowing where she was from, he figured it was just some Earth-like planet full of Earth-like people, a bit more advanced on the technology front, sure, but Earth-like all the same. Easy to understand, to relate to – a comforting illusion, like the idea that the Doctor was a thirty-something year old woman instead of a millenia-worn skin-changer. “Time is just another dimension of space. It can be seen across, and moved through, just as easily as you might walk in a line. You just need the right software,” she taps the side of her head lazily with her finger. 

“So, you’re sayin’ you can see _ time _ ?” 

She shrugs, the corner of her mouth quirked up into a surly grimace. “Sort of. It’s like a web – tangled threads, remember? Not really a word for it in your language. I could show you,” she says, raised eyebrows, curling grin, “– but it would destroy your mind.”

“Right. Better not then.” he answers, brittle. The look in her eyes resembles one she’s worn before, glaring up, the lazy line of her shoulders stretched out, a brow raised, blue light;  _ you don’t know me.  _

“Point is,” she breaks the tension, sensing his unease, “the tiniest things, pebbles on the surface, they create ripples. They can become waves, tidal waves. That one, tiny change can have catastrophic consequences. Words are important, like I said. Words change lives.”

“Lives change worlds,” he echoes, remembering something else she told them, when confronted by the ruins of their home planet. 

“Exactly,” she nods. “I’ll tell you something though,” and she turns to meet his eyes, leaning forwards, smirking wryly, conspiratorially. “I have no idea what I’m doing,” the admittance unfolds like a realisation on her face as it slackens, shocked. Admitting a truth to the open air, and to herself. “I never really have. Sometimes the only choices you have are bad ones, but you still have to choose.” And sometimes the only choices you have seem impossible, but the choosing happens, all the same, and time diffracts around the obstacle like wavefronts of light, or ripples on water, and go on. Now he’s the one at the door, one foot out of it, restless, ready to leave, and she’s the one staring out across the crowd, their faces and voices like so many obstacles stacked between them, noisy, because she just  _ won’t talk.  _ She needs him to stay, because she’s running from something, and she’s scared to look back lest it meet her, face to face. He’s looking for a reason, like a nod across a hall, and this is it – step two. A reason to stay, despite the inevitable consequences. 

“That’s okay,” he says, “I don’t know what I’m doing either. Don’t think anyone does.” Her eyes betray her need to say something more, something that probably won’t be nice, but she buries it in a glare, and nods. “I know what you’re thinking, how long have I been here,” her gaze softens, opens her mouth like she might apologise, but he presses on, “feels like forever to me, obviously, but I know it’s no time at all. I might not know how the universe works and all that, but I know that talkin’ about things helps.” 

She nods, “you’re probably right about that,” but doesn’t make the effort to follow his advice. She leaves it at that. Unsaid, hanging between them like those faces and voices in the crowd, obscuring intent. 

“It’s funny, I used to think you were like, my weird aunt or somethin’.” He’s still trying to decide who she is, really. She doesn’t give them much to work with – and the scraps she does are contradictory, so that any mosaic constructed of those composite scraps are warped, never quite slotting together into a clear picture. Maybe they’re pressed too close to the canvas, and stepping back would reveal a bigger picture woven from those scraps, but it’s too large, and there’s an abyss behind them where the ground drops off into blackness.

“Nah,” she smirks, “I’m worse than an aunt.” 

“Got anymore secret alien powers?” he tries to lighten the mood, step a little closer to the canvas. “You realise you have to tell me if you’ve got, like, tentacles or something.”

“Tentacles?” she exclaims, eyebrows shooting up. “Where would I be hiding tentacles?”

“I don’t know,” he shrugs, “dimensional engineering?”

“Hmm,” she considers, eyes darting away, “fair point.”

“What?” He was joking, obviously, but with everything the Doctor’s told them, this revelation wouldn’t be too far from plausible. There’s a place somewhere in that incongruous, jarring mosaic, he thinks, for another impossibility. 

“This is my actual body, Ryan, promise,” she assures him. “I don’t have tentacles.” She throws him a mischievous look, echoing painfully of her former self, “unless I do.” Ryan isn’t sure when exactly that switch happened – from former to current – perhaps it was gradual, and by the time they all noticed the facade falling it was too late to trace the origins of that slip. He makes a show of gasping, playing along. “I don’t,” she says again, and, when he looks away and thinks the matter settled, she whispers into the gloom; “or do I?” He smiles, humoring her attempt. Things are never certain with her; ghosts not existing, unless they do; able to save some, but not others; interfering, and not interfering. He assumes it’s all a matter of perspective, they problem being that nobody but her seems to share it. Nobody but her can see that web. 

The console dings, shattering the uneasy quiet, the flimsy pretence. On a silver track extending from the console, like a minute conveyor, a biscuit slides with a dull crunch. The Doctor smiles up at the ceiling. “Oh, that’s just brilliant. You always know just what I need.” She turns to Ryan, raising her voice to its usual (or formally usual) chipper tone. “Fancy a biscuit break, Ryan?”

“Sure,” he humors her. 

She darts up from her position on the stairs, practically launching herself down towards the central dias. In her haste, Ryan catches a glimpse of a smile fading from her face, her hold relinquished just a moment too soon. The cruel curve of her mouth imprints itself behind his eyes, remaining long after she’s past him in a flash of deep blue and spun gold. 

She holds a custard cream out to him like an offering, which he takes. The flimsy pretence. They eat in silence, until they don’t.

“Do you ever hate me, Ryan?” she asks. She brushes a cluster of crumbs from the corner of her mouth and leans back, the sharp edge of the step above cutting into her spine as it curves, head up, gaze wandering in the stratosphere. 

“Why would I hate you?” 

“‘Cause I’m not very nice. I try to be, or I tried, but it’s not working anymore and,” she pauses for a moment, letting out a long, slow, shuddering breath. “If I’d left you alone, your nan would still be alive.”

He feels his stomach sinking. “And Karl would be dead. It’s weighing lives, like you said. They’re all bad choices.”

“Yeah.”

“And – I mean obviously I wish she were still here – but good things have happened since then, too. You’ve done good things for us, all of us.” Brought them together, made them better; confident, courageous, and kind. “I guess I’m sayin’ that, even when the worst happens, and you feel like nothing’s ever going to be okay again, things just keep on happening anyway, and some of those things are good.” She nods, and he can see her hold on the world slipping, shoulders slack and face void. She looks exhausted – they haven’t seen her sleep in weeks, maybe months. It’s travelling, maintenance, and then (they suspect, because she never tells them outright) jumping ahead to the next adventure. “Obviously it would be better if the bad stuff never happened – I’m not saying problems are lessons, or opportunities or nothin’ – but good can come of them.” He thinks of himself and Graham, and how they might never have made peace, at least for a long while, if they hadn’t been forced into that uncomfortable loneliness of Grace’s absence, the person that held them together, and held them up, wrenched away. They were forced to support each other. “You know,” he reflects, “like bonding over grief, or – you know – whatever,” he casts her a furtive glance, hoping she might fill in the gaps for him, because something’s happened to her, something that’s sent her spiralling. He knows what grief and depression look like – even on an alien face, laced through the muscles of an alien body – misery hangs the same. “So yeah, I could never hate you. Normally I’d say you don’t need to hear it, but I think you might right now; you’re sort of amazing.” 

“Thanks.” She doesn’t refute it, though she seems as if she wants to. It’s a start. “Are you going to leave, once all this is over?” 

“Don’t know,” he admits. “Maybe. But I promised I’d stand by you, so here I am.” She’s chosen her place as well – the Earth, for whatever tangled web of reasons, and she’s chosen them. She chose to stay. “Whatever happens down there, though, I want to say thanks. For everything, you know – makin’ me feel special,” because for a long time he thought he was anything but. 

A small, genuine smile spreads across her face. “Thank you, Ryan Sinclair, for exactly the same.” To his great surprise, she leans across, resting her shoulder against his arm. A moment held in suspension, and he feels the air drawn from her lungs, feels her deflate, and tilt her head to rest upon his shoulder. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I've got all the companions quoting Clara in this but it's not my fault Clara and 12 had the most tender, beautiful dialogue in the series  
> also I just... I just really like 12


	5. Where we stand is where we fall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short concluding chapter. Wanted to get this out before episode 9 :0

_ Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day, _

_ And men forgot their passions in the dread _

_ Of this their desolation; and all hearts _

_ Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light. _

Sheffield, 2018

She stands with the three of them on the street, still wearing the clothes of a previous body. Usually by now she’s picked out something new, something that suits her, but this time around was always going to be different. Not because of the whole gender thing – though she assumes that’ll take some getting used to in a social context – but because, not too long ago, she had been entirely convinced that she was going to die.  _ I will not change _ , she remembers saying, with a different voice. A very different voice. Everything about this new her is  _ different,  _ and she’s still not sure if beginning again was a good idea. She closes her eyes as the wind whips at her face; smooth, young. A mask. Her fists are balled within her sleeves, still smelling of the artificial mud from a Mondassian colonist ship, still singed with the afterglow of laser fire. Cybermen. She’s never liked them – their brutality, their singular focus, the way they take beautiful minds and turn them into mechanised tools. Weapons, from children of time. She pushes the sentiment from her mind, because this new her, she’s decided, won’t dwell on the past. It’s not a very nice place to live. 

They ask her if she has a family, and she tells them the truth; long lost, carried in memory. A battlefield, where everybody else has fallen. She was supposed to fall too, but foolishly, she’d changed her mind. One more lifetime won’t kill anyone – except Grace. Except all those other people Tim Shaw had offed along the way. It would have been worse, perhaps, if she hadn’t been there. Worse for Karl, definitely, but not worse for Grace – she would still be alive. But, she reprimands herself, that’s weighing lives – that’s being a monster. She won’t be a monster this time around, so when they ask, she tells them; “just a traveller.” All this time spent watching them, she’s been mulling over something in her mind – her next step. She can’t keep doing this; picking up strays, showing them the sights, leading them into danger, and mourning them when they fall. It’s a shame, because she likes them, she really does. They’re perfect for her; three humans who want more, who thirst for adventure. They’re kind, and curious, compassionate and determined. Fast and funny. 

It’s a shame, so she stays with them for as long as she can. She drags Ryan and Yaz across town to get her new look sorted. It would have been nice if she’d had the TARDIS wardrobe handy, but going back to her ship would mean leaving her new friends behind, and she doesn’t want to do that just yet. She drags them, first, to a piercing parlour – which makes Yaz scoff at her ‘messed up priorities’ – and then to charity shops, slinging articles off the shelves at random. She knows what she’s looking for; something youthful and bright, maybe a bit ridiculous. Garish, colourful, but with a solid theme. No more black, and no more brooding. No more grumpy old man. 

Over the next day or so, her three best friends weave in and out of the abandoned warehouse in which Tim Shaw had emerged. It’s full of very handy (and very infuriating) Stenza tech, which she’s repurposing into a teleport to take her to her TARDIS. She can still knock about the universe, keeping a promise to laugh hard, to run fast, to be kind – but to never stay still. Never get attached.  _ Oh,  _ he reminds her,  _ and never tell anyone your name (or what you are, or what you were – because if their hearts are in the right place, and the stars are too, they just might hear it).  _ Her name, the truth. She can’t let them. 

When they stand before her amongst the scrapped machinery and cannibalised alien tech, she finds it difficult, but entirely necessary, to say goodbye. 

She says she’s almost going to miss them – and in their eyes, their thoughts, she hears the sentiment echoed, and feels a pang of loss. She takes one final, starving look at them all, taking in the curves of their smiles, and the curiosity in their eyes. Almost going to miss them – almost, because she’ll miss them more if she sticks around, and repeats the cycle. The hardest thing is letting them go, but it’s easier when you do it early, before the fondness takes root and becomes something foolish. Something toxic. And what’s the point in being happy now, if she’s going to be sad later? 

That, she remembers, is exactly the point; because she’s going to be sad later, because everything ends. That’s her final thought as she sucks in a breath, and activates the teleport. She’s going to be sad later. 

...

The Time Vortex,  ∞

She stays a while with her head upon Ryan’s shoulder. His breathing is slow and deep, deliberate. Steadying himself for her sake. He’s silent, and so is she – so, even, is the ship in it’s quiet, methodical whirr. She tries to remember the last time she leant on somebody like this, uninjured and uninhibited. Voluntarily. She’s fairly certain she’s never done it at all.

The crystal pillars pulse bright, and a soft alarm warbles from the engines far beneath. She perks up, dislodging her jaw from its place amongst the fabric of Ryan’s shirt. Away from him, the air is cold. 

“What’s that?” he asks, groggy. 

“That would be the coordinates.” She tries to inject cheer into the phrase, but she’s not exactly happy about it. They could, theoretically, run away from all this. Let the human race toil away in that far off, increasingly probable future, nameless and oblivious and suffering. There are a great many wars raging across the universe, across time, and they’re not her responsibility. She’s not a war hero, not anymore. Just a traveller. She’s got her flimsy twenty-first century linearity, her comfort zone. It’s been enough so far, erasing her tracks, rebooting, wiping the slate clean so she can start again; regenerated, never remembered. 

“Great,” Ryan says. The Doctor alights from the steps and heads for the console, ignoring the ship’s persistent output of yet another biscuit, like an offering. Like an apology. She won’t leave, can’t, because she’s made her choice, and they’ve made theirs. She’s chosen where she’ll stand,  _ and where I stand is where I fall. _ They’ve chosen the same, in standing by her. Hopefully it won’t come to falling, not for any of them. Getting killed by cybermen twice in a row would be more than a tad embarrassing. 

Beneath the console, Yaz stirs.

“Oh no, Yaz, stay there a second,” Ryan exclaims, darting down from the steps and fishing his phone out of his jacket pocket.

“What am I...’ she mumbles, looking down at the Doctor’s coat fabric in confusion. 

“Welcome back Yaz,” the Doctor chirps, working away at the console, plotting their trajectory through the vortex. “Coordinates are in, so it’s time to get going. We’ll wait a bit before landing, gotta scope out the cyber tech, get the lay of the land, work out what we’re up against. We’ll go from there.”

She nods, exhaustion forgotten. “What do you need?” 

“I need you two to be safe,” the Doctor replies, nodding at them both; Yaz, on her feet and eager, and Ryan, sombre and resolute. “Stay close to me, do exactly as I say, and no taking risks. No recklessness,” her eyes dart to Yaz, “understand.” 

She looks for a moment as if she’s going to argue, but instead nods, a conspiratorial curl at the corner of her lip.

“What’s all this ruckus, then?” a voice calls, and Graham comes padding into view at the top of the stairs. 

“Ah, Graham!” she beams, “just the man I wanted to see. Coordinates are all set. It’s time to get to work.”

“Right,” he clears his throat, walking down the steps, “excellent. Bring on step two.” 

The Doctor’s fingers hover over the dematerialisation lever, hesitant. The next step, she thinks, along the spiral, making up for the mess she made in step one. Always towing the line, bending the rules, to guidelines, to flimsy excuses held up when convenience demands them. Fixed points, but only when she says so. Be kind, but only when it suits. 

Facing off against the line cyberman, she’d felt an old anger stirring, slights she thought forgotten dredged up and spun to face her – a new face, hiding old pain. She’s beginning to remember just how small the universe is. With her friends, it’s easy to forget. It’s easy to race across its seemingly boundless lengths, seemingly infinite potential – their wonder is enough to fill both her hearts, make her youthful, make her light. But the universe, after all this time, is cold, and dark, and desolate. Small, especially when she’s angry. Cybermen are inevitable, and so is war, and suffering, and her, making the impossible choice. 

Losing them is inevitable, and she’s worried about what she might become if it happens today.

Times end, moments pass, leading to new moments; good and bad, never softening nor spoiling – or so she’d said. Or so she’d thought. But sometimes the bad moments are rich as rot, black and sweet-aching, burrowed bone-deep and prong-veined. She’s been rotting for a while now. It dug into her core the moment she saw Gallifrey burning. 

“You ready, Doc?” Graham asks, eyeing her with concern. She’s still gazing down at her trembling fingers, poised above the lever. The way he’s looking at her, it’s as if he’s deconstructing her, trying to push her face into a new shape, else spot another one hidden beneath it. A past face. 

“Yeah, just,” she sighs, smiling apologetically, “you sure – all of you?”  _ Be sure  _ – but hadn’t she known then, just as she does now, that they were only ever going to say yes? Yaz said it wasn’t worse, that knowing, but she still thinks it is. 

“We’re sure,” Yaz is the first to say. It’s not just admiration in her eyes, not the usual glossy-eyed wonder, but a steely determination. It’s echoed in all three of them.

“Yup,” Ryan nods.

“‘Course,” says Graham. 

She takes one final, starving look at them all, taking in the curves of their smiles, and the courage in their eyes. “Okay then team,” her grin widens, “gang,” a tilt of the head, “fam,” she winks, and they humour her with a smile of endearment. A final performance, slotting into a familiar role. She’ll need to stick close to that role, that promise, where they’re going. She has to remember to be a Doctor – but what’s the point of a Doctor who can’t save people? “Let’s get a shift on.” 

Every action, every nudge, every wonky rule bent to the point of breaking, all of it pushes her, and the universe, closer to the edge. A collapse of that meticulous web, strands tangled and taut to the point of snapping, and her, caught within it. No more ripples, but still water. A dead sea. Death and darkness, absolute, because she had made it so. Darkness, like a constant companion, brought along with her like a storm, oncoming. 

_ The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave, _

_ The moon, their mistress, had expir'd before; _

_ The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air, _

_ And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need _

_ Of aid from them—She was the Universe. _

**Author's Note:**

> Subsequent chapters will make more sense (I promise)


End file.
